Baking the Pottery

Baking the pottery. After the potter is through working with the vessel on the wheel, he places it on a shelf where there are rows of other vessels, and where they are kept from the direct rays of the sun, and yet where they are exposed to the wind from all directions. The brickkiln where they are baked is a shallow well of stone or brick around four feet deep and eight to ten feet in diameter, which has a small brick oven at its base. The vessels are piled up over this oven in cone-shape, sometimes to a height of twelve feet. It is then covered thickly with brushwood in order that the heat may be kept in and that there may come no sudden chilling. The fire is made to burn until the pottery is hardened sufficiently.5 The prophet Nahum refers to the preparation for baking pottery when he says: "Make strong the brickkiln" (Nahum 3:14). Sometimes inferior products are made by insufficient burning of vessels. [Manners And Customs of Bible Lands]

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